PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

Cloudinary, Acquia DAM, Filestack, Islandora

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

Cloudinary

No

Acquia DAM

No

Filestack

No

Islandora

Yes

Everything else

Cloudinary
Acquia DAM
Filestack
Islandora
Verdict
A developer-facing image and video transformation API and CDN, billed from one pooled credit balance covering storage, transformations and bandwidth together.
A quote-only enterprise DAM (formerly Widen) built on configurable metadata and external sharing portals, for organisations already standardised on the Acquia stack.
A file upload, transformation, and delivery API with a drop-in picker for 20+ sources, for developers adding file handling to web and mobile apps.
An open-source, community-governed digital repository platform on Drupal, for libraries, archives, and museums to manage digital collections.
Price published
Yes
No
Yes
No
Billed on
Credits: one credit is 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of video bandwidth
Organisation size, user count, storage volume and feature set
Monthly subscription tiers with bundled resource allowances (bandwidth in GB, uploads counted per file, transformations per file/image operation, storage in GB, number of team members), plus per-unit overage fees once a tier's allowance is exceeded (e.g. Start plan overage is $0.2/GB bandwidth).
No published price on islandora.ca — the core software is free open source ("free to use and always will be"). Paid options are hosting/installation/migration/support/training contracts sold by independent third-party service providers listed on islandora.ca/service-providers (e.g. Born-Digital, discoverygarden); islandora.ca itself does not publish their rates or billing units.
Deployment
Cloud
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise, Cloud
Free plan
Yes
No
No
No
Free trial
Yes
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
60%
20%
Not checked
Not checked
Most common complaint
Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price
Cost depends on four variables at once, none of them priced publicly
Not checked
Not checked

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

Cloudinary Prices are published for the API but not for the DAM, so the product being compared with a DAM still has no price — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Acquia DAM Cost depends on four variables at once, none of them priced publicly — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.